Instagram Spam Purge Jettisons Millions of Accounts

Since its popularity rocketed, photo-sharing platform Instagram has been plagued with spam accounts. To rectify the problem, Instagram staged a massive purge of users it deemed to be spammers, removing well over 20 million accounts.

The purge, dubbed the “Instagram Rapture”, has had a huge impact on the top 100 Instagram accounts, with celebrities such as Justin Bieber and Akon, losing 3.5 million and 2.5 million followers, respectively. Instagram itself lost 18,880,211 followers. Kevin Systrom, Chief Executive and founder of Instagram, said, “We’ve been deactivating spammy accounts from Instagram on an ongoing basis to improve your experience.”

“As part of this effort, we will be deleting these accounts forever, so they will no longer be included in follower counts. This means that some of you will see a change in your follower count.”